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Home > Marketing & Innovation > Content > Articles

If A Voice Had Color
Excerpts from an Interview with Ari Manor, CEO of ZOOZ

Published in Haaretz, “10!” Supplement (Quality and Excellence magazine), November 2007

By: Na’ama Avital

In a world where we work on auto pilot most of the time, how are new and groundbreaking ideas conceived? Well, it turns out that it is possible using tools that develop creative thinking. In this competitive era of ours, anyone that strives toward excellence cannot afford to overlook this type of thinking.

Even a business that does not have any grandiose plans to grow must keep moving and innovate in order to succeed and stay in the game.

If the 20th century paradigm was Science and Technology with the groundbreaking scientist in the center, now, in the corporate-capitalist era, everyone needs to think innovatively and creatively, not in order to make revolutionary breakthroughs, but often just to survive in a demanding and dynamic economic system.

Nowadays, even a business that does not have any grandiose plans to grow must keep moving and innovate in order to succeed and stay in the game. Someone that fails to do this can easily find himself falling behind. This is why the main industry that has adopted creative and innovative thinking in recent years – is the corporate industry. You can currently learn about creative thinking at business administration schools around the world, and numerous companies use the services of facilitators and instructors in the field of creative and innovative thinking.

The practical approach of tools and methods to develop creative thinking is indeed adapted to the business-oriented world, although this is not a simple technique that generates brilliant ideas that instantaneously conquer the market. Armed with extensive experience in the industry, Ari Manor, CEO of ZOOZ, which specializes in marketing and organizational consulting and training for businesses, says: “When I managed SIT (a company that implements thinking tools) and taught dozens of innovation workshops, I realized that tools were not enough. What always concerned me was the fact that there are companies and organizations that were given the tools for creative thinking and made money from it, while other companies thought of good ideas but nothing actually came of it. This led me to the conclusion that innovation in organizations is a complex and broad topic, that ongoing assistance is required, and not to stop at the first stage – creating new ideas”.

What tools do you work with at the innovative idea generation stage? And what else do you still need to pay attention to for it to really work?

“We use several tools during the idea-raising stage, such as inventive thinking, group brainstorming, de Bono’s tools, and more. The tool that I tend to use if I want to work with a lot of people at once is the SCAMPER tool, which stands for Substitute, Combine, Adjust, Modify, Put-to-other-use, Eliminate, and Rearrange. These are actually seven manipulations that you can perform on any product (and just for the record, a product doesn’t have to be something concrete; it can also be a service, management method, etc.) to get a new product. Let me give a few examples: Using the first manipulation Substitute – we substitute one component of a product with another component that it does not have. A waterbed is an invention where the water substitutes the springs, or a Tivall schnitzel where soy substitutes the chicken. Using another manipulation, Adjust, we take a product and adjust it for something else. An example is children’s meals at restaurants. At one time, restaurants only offered adult meals and then someone came up with the idea of adjusting the meals to the needs of a specific audience. For a final example, using the manipulation Rearrange, we take the existing components of a product and change their order around. An example is a refrigerator with a freezer at the bottom. These and other tools are simple to learn and can easily be used to come up with new ideas. So, like I said, it’s not enough.

New ideas can easily create resistance. A creative idea must shake things up, be groundbreaking, so obviously it will lead to both resistance and confusion. Some managers, for example, will not encourage the promotion of ideas that are not theirs. If you have come up with an innovative idea but you have a manager like this – the idea won’t go anywhere. It’s important to learn tools that will help us discuss controversial ideas, tools to prevent stagnation – our own and other people's. For example, de Bono has a tool called OPV (Other People’s View) that we can use to simulate and identify difficulties that someone else has about our idea. When you develop sensitivity toward what other people think, then you develop ways to influence the promotion of your idea”.

So, what’s next?

“Now comes the idea-screening stage. Let’s say that I have 200 new and good ideas – you have to decide what to go with. This is where the marketing tools come in. You need to develop internal criteria that pertain to the product’s applicability, to attain the forecasted profitability, etc. After this stage, let’s say we are left with 20 good ideas that successfully meet the marketing criteria, and then that’s the time to take a survey and ask customers what they think. Products can fail on very small details during the final stage of the process. For example, you’ve invented an incredible and innovative product but you’ve given it a name that’s difficult to pronounce, it’s possible that just because of the embarrassment a customer might feel while trying to say the name will prevent them from recommending the product, even if they think it’s good”.

So far, we’ve mainly discussed creativity in the product department. Is there creativity in other departments as well?

“Creativity is everywhere. For example, what currently interests me the most is innovation at the strategic level, meaning building new business models, thinking about new target audiences, fundamental changes. This type of innovation can lead you to invent something that will make the entire market irrelevant or to think about something that will make the actual problem irrelevant”.

This reminds me of the story about The Great Horse Manure Crisis in London, where the general and widely accepted consensus at the end of the 19th century was that London would not be able to grow and expand any further, because the population would simply be buried under a meter of manure. People were sent to invent new methods to deal with the horse waste and then the automobile was invented.

“Yes, that’s a fundamental change. There are strategic-level changes that are less dramatic, but very successful. For example – the Fox chain, which started as an idea of a small stall selling cotton shirts, inside malls. Before that, stalls selling cotton shirts could only be found in the market, while malls had large clothing shops. Fox came along and set up a market-style stall inside an air-conditioned mall, and therefore there was no other store in the mall that competed with them. This is an example of innovation at the strategic level”.

This is also what Bill Gates did, invented a new idea that did not previously exist and that changed our entire reality, no?

“No, Bill Gates did not actually conceive of anything. He was good at identifying things that others had conceived, buying and marketing them. He knew how to leverage things that others invented”.

So then maybe this is also worth learning?

“Of course. Even if a company comes up with new ideas on its own, it needs to learn to leverage these ideas. This is the only way it will have a chance of benefitting from them”.

And finally, should creative thinking be done alone or together?

“I think that the group brain is stronger. I, for example, have a lot of experience with innovation and an in-depth knowledge of all the creative thinking tools, and so I can think about a product and quickly come up with dozens of innovative ideas for it. However, when I think together with a group of people that they are experts and understand the subject, we always come up with ideas that surprise me. In general, when I work in a group (usually 8-10 people), I aim for it be a “colorful” group, containing both young and old, R&D people and marketing people, women and men. The different ways of thinking greatly enhance the creative effect. So, even if someone is a real expert, a group can always keep things fresh and surprise him, and that’s what we’re looking for”.


Systematic Innovation

Interested in developing products or services using systematic inventive thinking?

Contact us: [email protected], +972-9-958-5085

Information on Systematic Innovation workshops appears here.



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